Passport & Plate - Foraged Elderflower Cordial
United Kingdom | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 
flickr photos
Ingredients
Makes about 1 gallon (4.5l) of cordial. It might seem like a lot but it needs to last all year! Just adjust these quantities to suit your needs.
About 70 freshly gathered elderflower heads. Choose flowers that are fully open with lots of lovely buttery-coloured pollen, before they start to turn brown.
6lb (2.7kg) of un-refined golden granulated or caster sugar
6 UK pints (3.4l) of boiling water
4 lemons (ideally unwaxed, failing that washed carefully in detergent & rinsed)
4 oranges (likewise)
4oz (100g) of citric acid (get this from a home-brew supplier, or a chemist’s)
You will also require -
A large stainless steel pan or food-grade plastic bucket, with lid, big enough to hold all the ingredients (if you have a second one of these, this will also come in useful)
Jelly bag or fine strainer and muslin
Enough bottles to hold your cordial. Well washed plastic soda bottles (or even milk bottles) are a great option, and you can freeze your cordial in them.
Serving suggestions -
For a wonderful long soft summer drink (or a taste of summer in the depths of winter), simply dilute a good glug of cordial with sparkling water, serve with ice and a slice of lemon.
I love to use this cordial in a cocktail I call a 'Summer Sling'.
Over ice, combine -
A measure of decent gin, and
A splash of home-made elderflower cordial.
Top up with good un-filtered apple juice. British summer in a glass!
How to prepare this recipeFirst of all, gather your elderflowers. This recipe is all about time and place - the time is early summer, and the place is the English countryside. Pick your elderflowers on a sunny day, away from main roads, and choose only perfect blooms. Could there be a nicer way to spend an afternoon than a forager's walk?
In a large pan or bucket, combine the sugar and the boiling water. Add the citric acid, and stir until everything is fully dissolved. Allow the syrup to cool to room temperature - immersing the pan or bucket carefully in a sink full of cold water really speeds this up.
Slice your oranges and lemons thickly (about 1cm), and add them to the cool sugar syrup. Then add the elderflowers, one at a time, giving each one a good shake to dislodge any debris or creepy crawlies. Discard any substandard flowers.
The smell will be amazing, heady and richly floral. Give the mix a good stir, and allow to steep for two or three days, covered, at room temperature.
Once the flavours have infused, strain the cordial through a jelly bag (or use a sieve lined with a double layer of muslin). Then, allow the strained cordial to rest for at least 3 or 4 hours (or overnight) so that any sediment that survived the filtering – mostly pollen, which is very fine – can settle to the bottom of the bucket. If you use a good fine jelly bag, there’ll be very little sediment to worry about.
Ideally, sterilise your bottles before filling - glass bottles can be sterilised in the oven like jam jars (allowing them to cool before use). Plastic bottles are trickier but you can use a cold steriliser solution. Fill the clean and sterilised bottles using a jug and funnel, and seal them tightly.
Your elderflower cordial will keep in the fridge for about a month. Without refrigeration, there’s a significant risk of it starting to ferment! If you’re using plastic bottles, you can even stash them in the bottom of the deep freeze, where they'll keep for ages.
The story behind this recipeI chose this elderflower cordial recipe because it captures a perfect snapshot of place and time. It's the start of the summer, in my childhood. It's the holidays, and my grandmother is by my side, carrying a basket of freshly picked elderflowers as we walk along a chalk lane in the South Downs in Sussex. The sun is shining - because it's a golden childhood memory, of course, but also because picking elderflowers on a sunny day brings out their flavour.
The smell that fills the kitchen when I make this cordial, rich, sweet, and thickly floral, distills the start of the English summer - especially strongly as you simply cannot make this out of season. The elderflowers are there, a froth of white filling the hedgerows, and then they are gone - seize your chance while they last or miss out for a whole year.
The story of all good food is a story of time and place. A story of season, and of climate. But it's also a story of people - of family, and community, and culture. Food connects us, directly and viscerally, with who we are, and where we come from.
This recipe is one of the ties that bind; like other highly seasonal foods it connects me directly to the turning of the year. It heralds the promise of the long lazy days of summer to come, when I particularly enjoy this cordial as a long soft drink. But it also binds me tightly to my family traditions and to a wider social and cultural history of foraged food and of techniques for capturing and preserving the bounty of the changing seasons.
But if food can be about all of this, it must also simply be about taste.
This cordial is amazing. Children love it - I know I did as a child - as a sweet, floral and fruity drink simply diluted with water, or frozen as ice lollies. Adults find that it makes for a lovely sophisticated addition to cocktails. Creative cooks will find many other uses, too - think of deserts and salad dressings first, and see where your imagination takes you?
